by Amy Lane
He was talking too much, and as he opened the front door and ran smack into Djali, he could only be happy he’d been talking about inconsequentialities.
“Hey, Djali,” he said easily, looking into his friend’s startled eyes.
“I forgot my dress cravat,” Djali said, looking a little stunned.
“Well—” Torrant shook Djali’s hand soberly. “—my condolences, Djali. It’s going to be a tough day. Let the rest of us know if there’s anything we can do for you.”
Djali nodded and stepped aside to let Ellyot Moon pass, then hurried into Eljean’s room to see Eljean, who was leaning back, his hands laced behind his head as he stared up at his ceiling thoughtfully.
The state of the sheets could leave no doubt as to what had happened the night before.
“Eljean!” Djali said, looking at his friend with pleased surprise. “You and Ellyot?”
Eljean met his eyes and grimaced. “It wasn’t… it wasn’t real,” he said at last, looking into his best friend’s eyes with what he hoped was a philosophical expression.
“Then what was it?” Djali asked, going to Eljean’s wardrobe to look for his cravat. Eljean had the best clothes; they both knew it. Djali could afford more, but Eljean had the better taste.
Eljean smiled a little, allowing some of the dreaminess to creep into his eyes and his voice that he had carefully hidden from Elly—from Torrant. “It was… sweetness,” he said. “A gift. The kind of gift you don’t ask for twice.”
“Yeah?” Djali asked with a kind smile in his eyes as he found the cravat and started doing the complex knot required. He was always bad at this part, and his hands muddled helplessly.
“Yeah.” Eljean laughed. He swung his legs off the bed and wrapped a sheet around his hips, although Djali wouldn’t give a tinker’s shite if he forgot the cover or not. With a clucking sound, he shooed Djali’s hapless hands away from the cravat and started doing the knot himself.
“But that doesn’t mean you’d turn it down if he felt like giving again!” Djali accused with a laugh, and Eljean finally let loose and laughed with him.
“Damned straight, my friend. Damned straight.”
The Name and the Man
AYLAN KNEW something was wrong, and Torrant’s hasty note saying “Out for food, back soon” did nothing to make him feel better.
There were clothes belonging to a stranger crumpled in the corner of the room.
If Torrant had simply (please Goddess!) gotten lucky the night before, a liaison with no attachments and no complications, the clothes would have gone with the wearer. And the bed didn’t look slept in.
By the time Eljean knocked and turned the knob into the room, Aylan was on edge enough to tackle him as it was.
But the door was hardly closed behind the puppy when he breezily enquired, “Hey—is Torrant back with the food?”
Aylan pressed Eljean back against the wall with a forearm to the throat so fast that the taller man didn’t even have time to squeak in surprise.
“Where did you hear that name?” he graveled, and he could tell when Eljean closed his eyes that the damned useless git hadn’t been aware of the danger he’d put them all in until Aylan almost killed him over it.
“In bed—” Eljean bleated, and Aylan released him so abruptly Eljean stumbled and fell to his knees. Aylan, on the other hand, kicked the door and the legs of the couch and punched through the armoire door, swearing when he pulled a deep splinter from his hand, knowing it wouldn’t bleed.
“Aww, Oueant’s black eye, I’d rather it was during torture!”
“Why?” Eljean demanded, remembering for a moment he was just a smidge taller than Aylan and drawing himself up to his full height. “I know about Y… his beloved. I know he doesn’t feel that way about me. What’s so gods-blighted wrong about giving him a little solace, a little comfort, when he needs it?”
Aylan closed his eyes and looked at his flawless hand. He swallowed and looked back at Eljean. “How bad was it?”
Eljean shrugged. “I don’t know all of it.”
Aylan shook off the question and went back to being angry. “It doesn’t matter.” He kicked the couch again and hoped that Torrant felt that one in his bones. “It doesn’t matter”—kick—“it doesn’t matter”—kick—“it flat out doesn’t matter, because no matter how bad it is”—kick—“you don’t take advantage of him!”
He rounded on Eljean again. “If you fancied a man who didn’t fancy men, would you get him drunk and feel him up? Would you?”
Eljean flinched, knowing his shoulders had fallen into their habitual slope. “No,” he mumbled, “but it wasn’t like that—”
“It wasn’t? How do you know what it was like? When the Goddess leaves him he—he needs, do you understand that? He needs to know he’s still him, that he’s still human.” Ignoring the damned burgundy-and-blue-brocaded couch, Aylan sat down on the damned rich blood-colored carpet, looking miserable. “He needs to know someone will care for him, no matter what. Sex isn’t ‘no matter what.’ Sex is ‘if it keeps working.’ That’s not what he needed.”
“It’s what he seemed to want,” Eljean muttered, his voice clogged with hurt resentment.
“Did he lead?” Aylan asked bluntly, looking hard at him from his cross-legged position on the floor, and Eljean blushed and ducked his head.
“No.”
Aylan dropped his chin to his fist and sat there, contemplating the door Torrant would come through in a moment. “Then it wasn’t what he wanted.”
“How do you know?” Eljean whispered, and Aylan didn’t have to look to see the crystal shards of tears trembling on his lashes.
“That boy always leads,” Aylan snapped, feeling his own blush creep up his cheeks. “He doesn’t want to, but it’s all he knows how to do.”
At that moment, the door burst open, followed by an irritated—and limping—Torrant, who was balancing a paper sack full of pastries under one arm and sucking on a new scrape on the back of his hand.
“Dueant’s squashed stones, Aylan,” he griped, “what in the hell are you doing to yourself!”
Aylan stayed where he was, scowling, and then he looked sideways. Torrant looked to see Eljean, backed up against the wall, trying miserably not to cry.
“Sweet Oueant’s morning movement,” he blasphemed and then kicked the much-abused couch before turning to Eljean with the food.
“Ignore him,” he comforted, moving into the poor boy’s breathing space. “He’s a grumpy wanker—he always has been. Triane knows why some people find him charming.” Torrant handed Eljean the bag and smoothed a tear away with a thumb. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, right, Eljean? It was me, my weakness, my consequences—”
Eljean seized his hand, then looked at the still-bleeding scrape and at the splinter of wood Aylan had torn from his own hand. “You are bleeding twice for all of us, aren’t you, Triane’s Son?” he asked, the faintest tinge of irony in his voice, and Torrant aimed a scowl at Aylan that would have made anybody else run for cover. Aylan stuck out his tongue.
“I’ve lost as many brothers to this country as I can survive,” Torrant replied mildly. “Now sit—” He pulled out a chair from his small dinette. “—and eat!” He pointed imperiously to the bag of bread, cheese, and pastry. “We’ll be out in a moment, after I remind this bugger how to treat a guest.”
“You never treated me like that,” Aylan replied sourly, lifting his hand for a hand up. Torrant grabbed his ear instead and ignored Aylan’s outraged squeal as he dragged his angry brother scrambling to his feet into the bedroom for a chat.
“Would you like me to get you a puppy to kick, Aylan?” Torrant burst out once the door was closed. “Because a puppy might fight back!”
“How bad was it?” Aylan asked, going toe-to-toe with his brother, knowing his advantage in height irritated Torrant to no end.
“That’s not the point!”
“The hell it isn’t!”
“You told me to take a
lover!”
“How bad was it that you took him?”
Torrant took a step back, broke eye contact, and nervously looked sideways. “He’s a good man,” he muttered.
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Aylan said, lowering his voice as well.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Torrant sat heavily down on his bed and reached absentmindedly under his pillow, where he kept the cloak Yarri had made him. Silently, staring at the deeply colored carpet, he stroked that little bit of soft weaving, seeing her favorite color yellow behind his eyes.
“You don’t have a choice,” Aylan replied, and the bedsprings groaned as he sat down too.
Torrant looked at him then, his pain as naked on his hardening features as his scars had been on his chest the night before. “Oh, Aylan,” he murmured, his voice hollow. “Oh Goddess, the things I’ve done….”
Aylan wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him in, knowing this had been the comfort he’d needed the night before when he’d turned to Eljean.
“Nothing,” he said firmly into Torrant’s hair, “could make me afraid to touch my friend.”
And half strangled by irritation, half drawn out by questions, the story of the night before came out while Aylan rocked him and whispered soothing things into his hair.
Torrant finished up and stood, scrubbing at his hair and rubbing his eyes hard, as though they burned.
“What am I going to do?” he asked, groaning.
“About Jems or about Eljean?” Aylan asked back, stretching out on the bed. He was sleepy—the kind of tiredness that came from a busy week without enough sleep of any kind, followed by too brief a rest.
“Oh gods—about them both!” Torrant leaned back against the wall. There was a moment of quiet and then, as if struggling for words, he said, “I was going to send money to his family, to keep them from starving this winter. I mean, it wasn’t much, ye ken? But it was all I could do. It was all I could think of, and it felt like doing something—anything!—to make it better, right? And then I remembered….”
“You don’t have any money?” Aylan asked, shaking his head.
“Pretty much,” Torrant agreed glumly.
“Don’t worry—that much I can cover. The rest is going to be the healing in your own soul. I need to know, then. What about your heart, brother? Are you still going to have the heart for the fight?” Aylan looked at him soberly and was rewarded by a fierce, grim look from Torrant that did much to take the weakness away.
“With you at my side to protect, brother? Have no doubts.”
“Fair enough,” Aylan nodded, knowing it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t over. “And now for the really tricky part….”
“Eljean,” they both breathed simultaneously.
“What am I going to do?” Torrant wondered. “He—” Torrant ran his hands through his hair, leaving it in complete disarray without the band to secure it back. “He was so very kind, Aylan. He didn’t know. I tried to tell him, but how do you tell someone something like that? He—”
Abruptly, Torrant sat down on the bed and allowed his shoulders, for a moment, to slump, rolling them under Aylan’s rubbing fist as his friend kneaded abused muscles. “He needs something. I should do something. It’s not fair. He has done nothing wrong, nothing that deserves being discarded like a broken toy. And he’s a friend.”
“Wonderful,” Aylan groused, giving a particularly tight knot a thumb and a twist. Torrant yelped, and Aylan sighed in capitulation. “Give him something.”
“What? Like a gift?” Torrant frowned.
“No, you wank—like a part of you. Goddess! You’re the prettiest man I’ve met, inside and outside of my dreams—why didn’t you get some experience in this sort of thing before now? Give him something personal. Something real. Something that will let him know that he’s important, even if it’s not the sort of important he wanted. Give him something of yourself, even if it’s just your mother’s real name. You understand?” In spite of himself, Aylan yawned, and Torrant stood.
“Get some sleep. I might be in to nap in an hour or so. And yes, I understand. In fact, I think I know exactly what he’ll need. But first, I need to go breakfast with him, and then I’ll give you the details.” Torrant bent down and kissed Aylan on his forehead. “Night, brother. Love you.”
“Night, brother. Love you too.”
IT TURNED out that Eljean was a fair backgammon player. Torrant won their first three games—but it was by no means a walk in the park.
“Aylan can dust the board with my sorry arse.” Torrant laughed after the third game when Eljean swore soundly. “But then, after playing Stanny and Aldam for so long, it’s not like I had practice.”
“What about Yarri?” Eljean had the temerity to ask. The look of restrained agony on Torrant’s face made him wish he hadn’t.
“She’s fair at it,” he said after a moment. “She always would rather I read to her or sing. And then, while I was busy, she liked to illustrate—”
“Illustrate?”
Torrant yawned, wide enough to crack his jaw, and he rolled his dice for the fourth game. “Pictures. She loves color—draws pictures, makes pretty things out of cloth and yarn. It’s an art, the way she can look at a bolt of cloth or a crayon or a skein of yarn and then make something beautiful and… and so very her. She loved to draw the stories in the songs or the histories.”
He smiled a little dreamily as Eljean rolled double fours and moved. “She made a mural, for the orphanage. It hangs on sailcloth, and it’s just the pier out to sea, with children all dressed for the Beltane fair, ready to dance, walking up the main road.”
Torrant found he was blinking heavily, and it was hard to swallow.
“I was going to handfast her, this Beltane,” he blurted, not sure, really, why he was confessing this, except for the fact that Aylan already knew and now, with Eljean at least, he could savor the pain of saying it aloud.
Eljean rolled another double, and he contemplated the dice as though they had sprung legs and were conspiring to let him win. “Why didn’t you?” he asked roughly, not wanting to look up and see what was moving over his lover’s face.
“Triannon” came the harsh answer, and it was surprising enough for Eljean to raise his head and see the grim, terrible anger in the eyes of Triane’s Son.
Suddenly, Eljean recalled Ellyot Moon’s first spectacular day on the floor. “They were after Yarri,” Eljean affirmed, for the first time seeing how all that history could weigh in on that one moment in time.
“I don’t want to talk about Triannon,” Torrant said mildly.
“I still don’t understand what happened,” Eljean pressed and then backed away from the fierceness in Torrant’s eyes.
“What happened is Rath sent an entire company of soldiers to sack a college, hoping to kill Yarrow Moon.”
“But you said Yarri didn’t go to college.”
“Yarri’s cousin—Stanny’s sister?—Roes was there. Rath knew it was ‘the Moon girl,’ and because he’s as dumb as a bag of hammers, he tried to kill one girl and an entire student population. Aldam and I got there about two seconds before the army. We had just enough time to warn the militia—which was there to guard Roes, I might add, and to ward off this sort of thing, because we didn’t think he was going to send an entire company for one smallish woman and a bunch of children—and get everybody out. All the militia men defending the east side died. Everybody. Our friends and playmates killed three people for every one who fell.”
“But that leaves… sixty, seventy people. There was only one survivor.”
Torrant looked up at Eljean and allowed his eyes to flash blue.
Eljean dropped the backgammon pieces in his hands. “Gods!”
“No,” Torrant replied, his voice overly casual. “Not the gods.”
Eljean swallowed and picked up his backgammon pieces, and Torrant continued.
“I told you I have blood on my hands, Eljean. Did you think I was joking?”
“No.” Another swallow, and then Eljean asked the question that had been weighing on his mind since Aylan had asked.
“Last night. What happened?”
Torrant closed his eyes, and the blue went away, and a terrible weariness fell over his shoulders and the planes of his face. “You’ll find out soon enough,” he said, “and perhaps when you do, you’ll decide Zhane is more appealing company. But until then I think it’s my move.”
Torrant moved, and then Eljean moved. Torrant yawned again and again until Eljean, feeling dense, realized that Torrant was staying awake—barely—just for him.
“Go lie down,” he ordered gently, and Torrant gave a halfhearted shake of his head.
“I invited you.”
“I’ll read one of your books. Take a nap on your couch.”
“The others will be by when the bell rings,” Torrant told him through a yawn. “Invite them in, if you like. We can have dinner before Aylan and I go out tonight. I’ve got something I want to run by all of you.” He yawned once more, this time so widely that his eyes almost rolled back in his head, and Eljean laughed and shooed him back to his bedroom.
“One thing,” Torrant said from the doorway, and his eyes looked suddenly much more awake. “The name ‘Torrant Shadow’—that’s not to be said, not here. Not even Aylan calls me that in this place. Right?”
Eljean flushed, remembering Aylan’s reaction to that name earlier. “I understand.” And then he had a sudden, enlightened thought. “Torrian Shadow’s son?”
Torrant hissed through his teeth. “Indeed. And that there’s another name that shouldn’t be repeated.”
Eljean’s brow wrinkled. “Shouldn’t Djali know?”
The weariness that washed over Torrant’s face was enough to let him know this thought was far from new. “Soon,” he muttered. “After the pain of Ulvane has faded, after I’ve had a—” Yawn. “—nap.”
Eljean nodded, reassured, and waved him on, and then Torrant was gone, and the door was closed.